Posts by Ron 10

Treating tubing

This may be quite unnecessary, but:

Improved connection contact behavior, if necessary. Clean the inside of the copper with a mild acid or cleaner of choice. Maybe a bit of abrasion.

Coat wires to be inserted and the inside of the copper tubing with a material called Stabilant 22. This improves the contact between the materials and protects from oxidation/corrosion. Plain copper generates an oxide film fairly quickly. This insures max current flow for the circuit. The Stabilant actually conducts under pressure.

This may change retention force to a bit lower.

I use this stuff on any electrical connections. PC connections to power connectors. It is similar to magic.

How does system pricing compare to the high capacity tape systems? I view this as their actual long term market. A solid state device would be better, but disk is probably ahead on retention length at the moment.

It is clearly not as easy to pull a tray as a tape cartridge. On the other hand, tape (optical) machine formats and drives tend to go away after a bit as new versions appear or companies go out of business. The formats of the standard hard disk should survive much longer. Or, since they are well known and public, can be easily addressed in the future. Worse comes to worst, you can probably find something to read a current hard disk pretty far into the future.

Let us ignore for this discussion the actual need to keep many of these records forever. Tends to be driven by logically faulty laws.

When I was working, I did document imaging systems for the last 10 years or so of my working life. A really big issue (generally not shared by sales with the customers) is the obsoleting of optical disk formats. Some were proprietary formats or actual proprietary single source hardware. Your system breaks, company has gone out of business or no longer supports this stuff - your store of data to keep forever; ain't there any more.

Micro-(insert name of level of technology) film records are the only things that tend to be immune to format changes. They have some longevity issues; but can be minimized by expensive storage. Generally you can still read a microfiche from the late Roman empire if you can get a viable copy. No hardware or format issues.

This is one of the areas that I do not see being addressed in a rational way. Get past the stupidity of saving much of this stuff forever, there needs to be a way to deal with things that really need to be preserved. We can safely start deleting the building entrance logs from the 20's by now. How many billions of these things are eating trees and some form of electronic storage and accomplishing nothing. Particularly under the normal circumstances of not validating ID. Damn I hate the public perception of pretty much everything (e.g., making you sing in makes everyone so much safer). Particularly those things propagated by the government and large corporations.

Unfortunately many things require java runtime. Many things. I certainly hope Oracle will see their way clear to temporarily ignore their policy at being against the world, and release a patch asap. You just can't hold the keys to something like java and take a few months to patch an existing exploit.

What a noble and stalwart protector of the good of the people B&N has become.

They want to protect us from paying the same price for an e-book, with close to zero distribution costs, as a paper copy. Clearly, without the costs of printing (raw materials, transportation, labor, facilities), distribution, and trashing the value of unsold copies, they must have our best interests at heart in maintaining the same prices for both media. And to make the ambiance of buying books up to historic levels, it is certainly reasonable to charge the same for an e-book as the hard cover version of the book. Sometimes even after the paperback is out - ah the nostalgia.

And then there is the BS they are trying to implement to screw libraries. Much higher prices, e-books "wearing out" after a certain (low) number of times they are "checked out". Perhaps they should also implement a random required feed to properly simulate the historic losses from chew crazy dogs, lost books, spilled grape juice, and stolen copies. This would most completely preserve the wonders of commerce we have so long been able to enjoy.

And then, of course, there is DRM and some distributors tying the book to only their reader.

Actually it does not really work that way

Actually it does not really work that way. The overall power grid needs to be designed to handle "peak" loads. There must always be enough instantaneous capacity to meet demand; thus there needs to be enough capability from another fuel to keep the world running when wind is low (or it is night or cloudy for solar).

Therein lies the real problem. Most sources of electricity can not make quick changes from idle to producing power. Whereas wind has essentially instantaneous changes.

Solar and wind really don't work as a significant fossil fuel replacement unless there is an economical way to store power to meet peaks. Basically there is none and no really good prospects.

There is also recent information that wind farms are causing significant climate disturbance downwind of the sites.

Nuclear is really the only essentially zero carbon stable source. And can be made much safer if the greens of the world had not stopped reactor development in the US and some other areas a decade or two ago.

And you install it how?

Comcast still does it

First they did it without telling us. Then when people got pissed they set up a convoluted way to turn it off for your mail accounts. And then ignored the request. Try again you say; maybe you did it wrong. Nope. Still turned on.

People were not pleased so they set up a new simplified. First time I tried it; simply broken. Waited a few days and the process worked. Unfortunately they still redirect the damn misspelled links.

It is also always a joy when you are downloading a large file (e.g., installing .net) and the speed drops by half after a few minutes. But of course they are managing the network.